Statistical properties of stock market indices of different economies

Daily changes in the logarithm of stock market index from 1997 to 2004 are analyzed for countries from three subgroups of economies classified by the International Monetary Fund (IMF): developing Asian countries, newly industrialized Asian economies and major advanced economies. For all markets, the daily changes are well fitted by a non-Gaussian stable probability density. The time evolution of the standard deviation of the daily changes for each market obeys a power law. However, the developing Asian countries have the smallest stable density characteristic parameters α and the largest exponents b of the power law, except China's SSEC and India's SENSEX. The values of α and b for these two markets are closer to those of the newly industrialized Asian economies; in particular, those for China's SSEC are close to those for Hong Kong's HSI. The values of α and b for the newly industrialized Asian economies are in between those for the developing Asian countries and major advanced economies, consistent with the results for generalized Hurst exponent Physica A 324 (2003) 183]. The daily changes for the developing Asian countries and newly industrialized Asian economies have a weak long-range correlation, whereas the daily changes for the major advanced economies have a weak long-range anti-correlation.